Reviews: Amazon Pilots Include a Revolt and the Supernatural

Since 2013, Amazon has released a batch of original TV pilots several times a year for the public to review and vote on. Our TV critics take a look at the latest crop, which will be available beginning on Thursday.

‘Patriot’

Steve Conrad’s screenplays for “The Pursuit of Happyness” and “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” found unusual, resourceful ways to handle material that wasn’t easy to put on screen, at least by typical Hollywood standards. “Patriot,” which he wrote and directed, continues that trend — it’s best parts are utterly distinctive, even by the high standards of current television.

It’s nominally a genre drama, but it takes the espionage thriller and turns it upside down, or more accurately sideways. It presents deadly action as slow-boiling farce and mixes dark satire with a melancholy, blissed-out comic fantasy of fathers and sons bonding over money drops and assassinations. Michael Dorman plays a young intelligence officer with deadly skills and bad luck who deals with his angst by writing and performing hilariously sincere and morbid folk songs. (“I got some really bad intelligence/shot an old male hotel maid/who was just making the physicist’s bed.”) Terry O’Quinn is excellent as his sentimental but manipulative father, who’s also his boss.

Scene after scene plays out standard espionage tropes in unconventional, sometimes unsettling ways — shows like “Battle Creek” and “Fargo” may come to mind, but the closest recent parallel is “Mr. Robot,” which had a different, darker vibe but continually defied expectations the way “Patriot” does. Not every scene in the pilot pays off, but enough do to make you want to see what Mr. Conrad could accomplish across a full season. MIKE HALE

‘Good Girls Revolt’

If “Good Girls Revolt” didn’t have a ready-made title (from “The Good Girls Revolt,” the Lynn Povich book about a sex-discrimination case by female Newsweek staffers), “Mad Women” would have done nicely. This drama picks up nearly where “Mad Men” left off — in December 1969, in the swank Manhattan offices of News of the Week magazine, where researchers like Patti (Genevieve Angelson) and Jane (Anna Camp) report while their male writing partners hog the bylines.

The pilot, from Dana Calvo (“Made in Jersey”) smartly begins before the filing of the case, giving the story more potential to develop as a series. (Dropping the definite article seems to change the title from a descriptive into a credo.) But the period exposition and dialogue are heavy, man, from the opening lines (“Oh, man, things are getting groovy at Altamont Speedway tonight!”) to the newsroom-speak (“Let’s commit journalism here! Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable!”) to the K-Tel Overused Music Cues of the ’60s soundtrack (Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” The Zombies’ “Time of the Season”). You don’t so much watch this pilot as you’re marched through it by the wrist.

There’s growth potential in this story of women fighting for credit. But “Good Girls Revolt” needs to give its audience a little credit, too. JAMES PONIEWOZIK

‘Edge’

If Sam Peckinpah were alive and had access to all the special-effects tricks available today, he might have made “Edge,” an ultraviolent western that starts out with promise but degenerates into gore for gore’s sake.

That was a criticism “The Wild Bunch” and other Peckinpah films faced, but they at least had some moral themes and came at a time when mainstream audiences weren’t used to carnage. Nowadays the only reason to make something as over the top as “Edge” is to appeal to bloodlust. Max Martini stars as the title character (real name: Josiah Hedges), who is seeking to avenge the death of his brother.

It’s 1865, and Edge, a former Union soldier, goes after the men who did the deed, his former battlefield comrades. By the time the pilot is through, Edge has brought death of all sorts to a tiny town and has himself barely escaped it, his hunky body taking a ridiculous amount of punishment that calls upon Mr. Martini’s full arsenal of grimaces. A couple of female characters flit through, but this show (based on the George G. Gilman book series) is about guys and the many ways they can be shot, blown up, dismembered and so on. By the pilot’s end, it barely matters who is killing whom or why. NEIL GENZLINGER

‘One Mississippi’

Tig Notaro’s comedy pilot, “One Mississippi,” revisits some of the themes and autobiographical details that she’s mined for her stand-up and addressed in the road documentary “Knock Knock It’s Tig Notaro.” Written by Ms. Notaro and Diablo Cody and directed by Nicole Holofcener, it’s another instance of comedians playing fictionalized versions of themselves (Louis C. K., the master of the form, is an executive producer).

Ms. Notaro opens with a scene in a radio studio where she does a long routine about stuffed animals — the equivalent of the stand-up routines in “Louie” or “Seinfeld” — and then proceeds to play herself in a story about traveling home to Mississippi, where her mother is about to die. Noah Harpster, a writer and actor on “Transparent,” plays her brother, and a dryly funny John Rothman her stepfather. Casey Wilson of “Happy Endings” shows up as her girlfriend, Brooke, initiating a discussion of where Ms. Notaro’s breasts are — in real life, Ms. Notaro had a double mastectomy — that lands like a piece of stand-up transcribed into a screenplay.

“One Mississippi” often feels that way — as if Ms. Notaro and her collaborators haven’t solved the problem of fully dramatizing her story, leaving us with her entertainingly crotchety personality and perspective but not a lot more. MIKE HALE

‘Z: The Beginning of Everything’

By all accounts, Zelda Sayre (Christina Ricci) — author, flapper and future wife to F. Scott Fitzgerald — was full of surprises. And I’ll grant “Z: The Beginning of Everything” this: It’s not the sort of show I would have expected from any TV outlet, streaming or network. True-life biography hasn’t been a fertile subject for open-ended series, much less literary biography. And this pilot does more to highlight the challenges of the format than its potential.

“Z” is mainly an oddity in its first half-hour. We meet Zelda as a teenager in World War I-era Montgomery, Ala., chafing against the smallness of her world and the strict rule of her father (David Strathairn), a local judge.

Burdened with an obtrusive voice-over and ah-do-declare Southernisms, the episode feels like half a pilot, never developing Zelda beyond a standard-issue bright hometown girl with a hunger for something bigger (“I want to go someplace shiny and new that’s not obsessed with the past”). As for the tragic relationship that the series promises to explore, her soon-to-be beau (Gavin Stenhouse) makes little impression in his brief introduction. Maybe enough literary-love fans will support this show to earn it the chance to evolve. For now, it remains firmly this side of Paradise. JAMES PONIEWOZIK

‘Highston’

It’s not at all clear where “Highston” might be headed, but the pilot is an enjoyable off-the-wall excursion into an absurdist land where network sitcoms rarely go.

Lewis Pullman stars as the title character, a young man who sees, talks to and gets advice from celebrities who are invisible to everyone else. Everyone else, that is, except viewers, who most of the time see what Highston sees. In the pilot, that means Flea, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Shaquille O’Neal, who are both pretty hilarious.

They counsel Highston as his parents (Mary Lynn Rajskub and Chris Parnell) try to steer him gently into therapy. The pilot was written by Bob Nelson, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of “Nebraska,” and the show’s executive producers include Sacha Baron Cohen. It’s easy to see “Highston” becoming a trendy cameo stop for stars of all sorts. NEIL GENZLINGER

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Revolt and the Surreal Are Among the Newcomers. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe